Forthcoming in Science in the Age of Baroque (Gal and Chen-Morris, Eds.),
Archives Int. d’Histoire des Idées (2012)
What Was the Relation of Baroque Culture to the Trajectory of
Early Modern Natural Philosophy?
John A. Schuster
University of Sydney
Campion College, Sydney
Abstract
This paper attempts to answer the question posed in its title, by focusing attention on the institution and contested field of discourse of natural philosophy, and its processes of change
in the early and mid Seventeenth century. Following the seminal work of José Antonio
Maravall, Baroque culture is taken as a set of concerted responses to a wide religio-political
crisis. The paper then argues that this period saw a veritable ‘crisis within a crisis’ occurring in natural philosophy and its cognate and subordinate disciplines, with recruitment of
‘Baroque’ aims, styles and rules of contestation into natural philosophy by competing players. It is also suggested that some of these Baroque ‘cultural genes’ survived in the subsequent history of natural philosophy, and thence, following its disintegration, into the social
dynamics of the emergent modern sciences, shaping their agonistic natures.
1.
Introduction Thinking about “Baroque Science”
There are three broad options available for approaching the question, “What, if
anything, were the relations between the Baroque and (the process of) the Scientific Revolution?” [1] With historians of fine art, music, literature and architecture,
one could define Baroque style and trace its expression across creative domains
including natural philosophy and the sciences. [2] With social and political historians in the manner of, say, Carl Friedrich, one could delineate a social or cultural
period as Baroque, so that concrete relations might be delineated between this cul-
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ture and contemporary natural philosophising.1 The idea would be that in a culture
or social formation more than artistic expression is at stake—for example, forms
and norms of social interaction, resources for self-understanding and public expression by actors, organisational forms and styles, any of which might affect
natural philosophy and its subordinate sciences. [3] One could try to show that
there is something importantly Baroque about the end product[s] of the Scientific
Revolution, in modern science as a whole, perhaps.
It is fair to say that the Baroque Science Project—as conceived by the Editors
of this volume and exemplified in their Introduction and respective substantive
contributions—offers novel findings along all three of the above options (provided
that one does not see option [1] in terms of surface stylistic analogies, but rather in
terms of commonalities at deeper epistemic and cultural grammar levels. This paper is more limited in scope. It explores possibilities in option [2], based on the
belief that the Scientific Revolution was a complex process of change played out
within the domain of natural philosophy and its subordinate sciences. Hence,
whatever one might mean by Baroque ‘science’ or a Baroque shaping or influence
on science needs to be found by exploring the structure and dynamics of natural
philosophising, whilst simultaneously exploring what was Baroque culture. This
also means that this paper concerns a much shorter time segment than the Editors
take into view. It deals with the second and third generations of the Seventeenth
century, where many scholars locate both the climax of Baroque culture and a
moment of intense competition and turbulence within the realm of European natural philosophising—the problem being precisely what relations, if any, existed between the two. (Nevertheless, in the penultimate section of this paper we shall also
uncover a possible larger meaning for Baroque science, along the lines of option
[3], but only after the main argument has been set out.)
It should also be noted at the outset that this paper is experimental. It was conceived and written in response to the challenge and problematic of the Baroque
Science Project, and, as will be seen, its structure and argument depend upon accepting and articulating further certain conceptions current in parts of the literatures on the Scientific Revolution and general Seventeenth century intellectual history. I take this paper as a beginning and a spur to myself and others, not as a
definitive statement. That is the spirit in which earlier versions were presented at
conferences and workshops of the Baroque Science Project variously held under
the auspices of the Editors at the University of Sydney between 2006 and 2009,
and that is the manner in which drafts of the paper have been read and constructively criticised by participants therein, and by other colleagues.
In keeping with its exploratory tenor, the first thing question needing to be addressed about the structure of this paper is this: How to deal with existing conceptions of Baroque culture and that old chestnut, a ‘general crisis of the Seventeenth
Century’? This is because attempts to speak about a Baroque cultural or social epoch are easily conflated with allusions to a ‘general crisis’. Part of the problem is
1 Friedrich (1962)
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Forthcoming in Science in the Age of Baroque (Gal and Chen-Morris, Eds.),
Archives Int. d’Histoire des Idées (2012)
that social historical discussions of the Baroque, such as Carl Friedrich’s, do not
address the issue of crisis on a sustained historiographical level, whilst crisis theorists use evidence about Baroque art, but do not deal with the Baroque as a social
or cultural formation.2 However, there is a way of working with a conception of
Baroque culture, properly related to the turbulence we denominate by the term
‘general crisis of the seventeenth century’, and done in such a way that both issues
can be related to the structure and dynamics of natural philosophy. The result may
be some progress on the question, ‘Is there any relation between ‘the Baroque’
and (the process of) the ‘Scientific Revolution?’ For the sake of the experimental
historiographical argument of this paper, our starting point is the profound work of
José Antonio Maravall, in his Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical
Structure.3
Maravall interprets Baroque culture as a largely deliberate program of culture,
put forward, in slightly differing fashions in different states, by elite blocks of
monarchical and aristocratic interests who perceived threats to status, social hierarchy, social order and religious orthodoxy from mainly urban ‘middling’ classes
and groups, exercising resistance to political and religious centralisation and in favour of their own interests. This occurred under conditions, emergent in the later
sixteenth century and heightening in the next, of urban population expansion and
more readily available new communication technology, which helped create more
acute and transmissible senses of both problems and of their possible subjection to
human solution.4 These and other phenomena he nominally packaged under the
shorthand label ‘general crisis’. Maravall is interested in what went into this
manufactured, commodified culture product, and also in the lived experience of
people born into/living in it, because, once it was widely established, of course,
individuals lived and experienced their world through its forms and categories.
Thus, Maravall relates his interpretation of the Baroque to the idea of a general
crisis of the seventeenth century, by making the former the overall unintended result of concatenations of particular, intentional elite responses to, or perceptions
of, the latter. From the analyst’s standpoint, Baroque culture for Maravall is what
he calls an “historical structure”, by which he means, a constructed interpretive
framework taken to have real reference, which coordinates, explains and takes ac2 So, on the one hand, Friedrich mixed into his discussion of a Baroque ‘age’, culture or society, allusions to phenomena that may be
taken as direct evidence of building crisis. Similarly, on the other hand, Theodore Rabb (1975) in his first of two sojourns into the territory of the general crisis, discussed Baroque art half a dozen times, but he never theorised the Baroque as an ‘age’, culture or epoch.
Rabb’s recent work, The Last Days of the Renaissance (2006) effectively does away with the term crisis. Instead, marshalling much the
same evidence, he argues for an early seventeenth century phase of turbulence within, and inflection of, various ‘Renaissance’ structures
and processes, leading to different conditions in the later seventeenth century.
3 I owe this reference to Simon Schaffer, who pointed out its potential relevance to the Baroque Science Project problematic in conversation October 23 2007. Schaffer was pointing to the possible relevance to my natural philosophy ruminations of Maravall’s (1973) notion
of kitsch, commodified, dramatic display, a staple of Baroque culture, as redeployed by Clark (1992) in relation to kitsch experimental
displays in university teaching in late Baroque Germany.
4 Maravall, insists that there are generic properties of his interpretation applicable, with local national twists, to ‘Baroque culture’ as a
pan-Western European phenomenon.
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count of the relevant known phenomena and manifestations, and whose own trajectory is in turn historically explicable. At no point does Maravall claim that the
general crisis of the seventeenth century is a similar sort of ‘structure’ He is saying that the best we can do is take appropriate and well documented types of turbulence and conflict in the period, the ones most likely taken notice of by Baroque
actors, and label them the general crisis.5
Following Maravall’s strategy, I will relate my interpretation of natural philosophy and the process of the scientific revolution to his interpretation of Baroque culture and the general crisis. I shall deal with natural philosophy as a
model or “historical structure”; and, like Maravall, I shall denote turbulent, worrying phenomena by the term general crisis. In the case of natural philosophy, however, the term ‘crisis’ would denote a specified and evidentially supported phase
or state of play in this specific sub-culture. Exploring the structure and dynamics
of early modern natural philosophising and its attendant more narrow sciences, we
find that the so-called Scientific Revolution falls into several stages. One of these,
in the early to mid seventeenth century, had a particularly turbulent, ‘crisis-like
complexion’. Because this turbulent or critical period took place well within the
space and time of Maravall’s Baroque crisis this phase of natural philosophising
constituted a ‘crisis within a crisis’.
Thus, I aim to show by articulation of Maravall’s approach, that there was an
early to mid seventeenth century watershed crisis of natural philosophy inside the
more general crisis. Natural philosophy did not become Baroque in any simple or
straightforward sense. The impacts of the Baroque on natural philosophising; or,
better put, the recruitments of Baroque culture into natural philosophising, will be
approached by examining how the sub-culture or field of natural philosophising
worked, and how its structure and dynamics led to, and were inflected by, this crisis phase in its own history. To these ends, we shall analyse the structure and dynamics of natural philosophy in Section 2, followed in Section 3 by a periodisation
of the Scientific Revolution into stages in the evolution of natural philosophising
and its attendant narrower, subordinate sciences. Then Section 4 will deal with
the peculiarly turbulent and contested nature of natural philosophy in the crisis period, leading to our exploration in Section 5 of recruitments of Baroque culture
into natural philosophising during that period. Finally, in Section 6, a further surprising finding will arise concerning the themes of this paper.
5 What Maravall takes to be included in his general crisis is very close in description, given social and state structure differences, to what
Trevor-Roper long ago termed the ‘crisis of court vs. country’ in England. Similarly the trends in state structure, inter and intra state conflict, religious fission and warfare, and cultural pessimism that Rabb (1975) built into his crisis thesis, have chords and echoes in Maravall’s vision. The seminal papers by Hobsbawm (‘The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’) and Trevor-Roper (‘The General Crisis of the
Seventeenth Century’) on the crisis thesis first appeared in Past and Present and then were reprinted in Aston (1967) pp.5-95.
4
Forthcoming in Science in the Age of Baroque (Gal and Chen-Morris, Eds.),
Archives Int. d’Histoire des Idées (2012)
2.
Constructing the Category of Natural Philosophy—Natural
Philosophising as Culture and Process
To inquire about the ‘Scientific Revolution’ and ‘the Baroque’, we need both to
formulate our key categories and to design a workable periodisation concerning
the trajectories traced by the entities and processes those categories arguably denote.
In the early modern period the central discipline for the study of nature was
natural philosophy.6 In the first instance natural philosophy is an actor’s term, but,
if we metaphorically treat natural philosophy as an iceberg, actors’ usages are
merely the tip. We must also theorise the bottom of the iceberg, by modelling the
structure and dynamics of the game of natural philosophising, including points
that did not or could not have been known to the players. So, I model Early modern natural philosophy as a dynamic, elite sub-culture and field of contestation,
theorising about its structure, dynamics and its process over time. 7
When one ‘Natural philosophized’ one tried systematically to explain the nature of matter, the cosmological structuring of that matter, the principles of causation and the methodology for acquiring or justifying such natural knowledge.8
[Figure 1] The dominant genus of natural philosophy was, of course, Aristotelianism in various neo-Scholastic species, but the term applied to alternatives of the
various competing genera: neo-Platonic, Chemical, Magnetic, mechanistic or, later, Newtonian. Early modern natural philosophers learnt the rules for natural philosophizing at university whilst studying hegemonic neo-Scholastic Aristotelianism. Even alternative systems followed the rules of this game. All natural
philosophers and natural philosophies constituted one sub-culture in dynamic
process over time.
6 Peter Anstey and John Schuster, “Introduction” to Anstey and Schuster (2005) To place the evolution of natural philosophy at the centre of one’s conception of the Scientific Revolution is not novel, and more scholars are realising the value of such a perspective, but neither is it obvious or agreed upon in the scholarly community. H. Floris Cohen’s massive survey of the historiography of the Scientific
Revolution (Cohen, 1994) illustrates that the term ‘natural philosophy’ has been endemically present in the literature, but not systematically theorised, often serving as a synonym for ‘science’. Recent attempts to delineate the category of natural philosophy and deploy it in
Scientific Revolution historiography include Schuster (1990, 1995); Schuster and Watchirs (1990); Andrew Cunningham (1988, 1991);
Cunningham and Williams (1993); Peter Dear (1991, 2001); Peter Harrison (2000, 2002, 2005); and John Henry (2002).
7 The same historiographical strategy needs to be applied to other’ terms such as, ‘physico-mathematics’, natural theology, mixed
mathematics, method and natural theology (see Dr Larissa Johnson-Aldrige—Kaleidoscopic Natural Theology: The Dynamics of Natural
Theological Discourse in Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Century England, UNSW, unpublished dissertation, 2009). This strategy is
applied throughout my forthcoming study of the young Descartes: Descartes Agonistes, Physico-Mathematics, Method and Mechanism
1618-33. Materials tending toward the findings of the latter are contained in Schuster (1995, 2000, 2005); Gaukroger and Schuster
(2002).
8 Knowledge was not actually discovered and demonstrated by method—see Bachelard (1949), Kuhn (1970), Feyerabend (1975); Schuster and Yeo (1986); Schuster (1986, 1993) and others. Rather method discourse provided universally understood packaging and rhetorical framing for claims of natural philosophical type, and by means of the tools of logic provided natural philosophical players, as subjective agents, the technical capability for reflexively criticising, comparing, overthrowing and radically reworking the claims of others and
of themselves.
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The field, sub-culture or tradition of Natural Philosophy
Nature is a coherent unity, to be studied systematically under the dimensions of 1.matter 2.cosmos 3. causation 4. method
•Hegemonic Scholastic Aristotelianism[s]
Challenger Genera:
•Neo-Platonic varieties, high tide 1580-1620
•Mechanistic varieties, high tide 1640-80
Figure 1: Natural Philosophy—Generic Structure, Competing Genera
We should not simply equate “natural philosophy” to Scholastic Aristotelianism. Nor should we accept that after about 1660 natural philosophy died and was
replaced by an essentially different activity, Science.9 At its climax in the early
and mid seventeenth century—during the ‘crisis within a crisis’—the Scientific
Revolution was a set of transformations, a civil war, inside the seething, contested
culture of natural philosophising. That culture continued to evolve under internal
contestation, and external drivers, and variously elided and fragmented into more
modern looking, science-like, disciplines and domains, plural, over a period of
150 years from 1650.10
That there was a European culture of natural philosophising depended upon a
High Medieval development of world historical import—the establishment of a
European system of universities all teaching variants of a Christianised Aristotelian corpus in logic and natural philosophy.11 This fact continued and evolved into
9 Schuster and Taylor (1996, 1997); Schuster (2002).
10 Other contemporary knowledge systems, such as natural history and natural theology also need to be theorised in this manner and the
entire set examined for their dynamics and articulations over time. I have written several overviews of the Scientific Revolution in this
style. Schuster (2002), also Schuster and Watchirs (1990); and Schuster (1990). Recently the latter work was translated into Chinese and
published for the Chinese HPS market in an anthology on the Scientific Revolution edited by Liu Dun and Wang Yangzong (2002),
pp.835-869.
11 David C. Lindberg, for instance, asserts that “For the first time in history, there was an educational effort of international scope, undertaken by scholars conscious of their intellectual and professional unity, offering standardized higher education to an entire generation of
students.” Lindberg (1992) p.212.
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Forthcoming in Science in the Age of Baroque (Gal and Chen-Morris, Eds.),
Archives Int. d’Histoire des Idées (2012)
the early and mid seventeenth century.12 Although specific concepts constitutive
of Scholastic Aristotelianism were displaced during the seventeenth century, this
occurred inside the continuing, contested life of the larger field or tradition of
natural philosophising.
A Scholastic Aristotelian education taught that nature has a coherent, systematic unity; that nature not only can be studied by specific means but that correspondingly systematic knowledge of it can be obtained.13 This template for natural
philosophising also applied to all jostling species of natural philosophical challengers to Aristotelianism. Additionally, Scholastic Aristotelianism framed the
way in which other disciplines were conceived, and related to each other, and to
natural philosophising. The positioning of natural philosophical claims in relation
to other enterprises always involved two routine manoeuvres: the drawing and redrawing of boundaries and the making of linkages.14 This created the ‘objective
field of possible moves’ in which natural philosophers carried out their own specific systematising and linking strategies—claiming new linkages or defending
older ones—depending upon their respective aims and skills.15
One may think of the subordinate disciplines as an entourage of more narrow
traditions of science-like practice: [Figure 2] These included the subordinate
mixed mathematical sciences, as well as the bio-medical domains, such as anatomy, medical theorising and proto-physiology in the manner of Galen. The members of this entourage changed over time. In the seventeenth century, some were
disputed; some were created; all changed; new or revamped entourage members
evolved.
12 Concerning late scholastic education at the turn of the seventeenth century see Maclean (2007) and Des Chene (1996): Following
their work, I hold that most of what we conceive of as the process and the products of the ‘Scientific Revolution’ took place within patterns of change, internal contestation and contextual shaping in this evolving field or culture of natural philosophising.
13 Schuster (1990, 1995, 2002), Schuster and Watchirs (1990); Schuster and Taylor (1997)
14 Cf. Anstey and Schuster, ‘Introduction’ to Anstey and Schuster (2005). We shall refine the concept of boundary-work, including how
we think about players’ contestation about it, below in Section 4.5.
15 This manner of conceptualising a competitive creative ‘field’ of course derives originally from the seminal and suggestive work of
Bourdieu (1971a, 1971b, 1975). Cf. below Notes 26 and 69.
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Figure 2: Generic Structure of Natural Philosophy and Possible Entourage
of Sub-ordinate Fields:
In a given system of natural philosophy: (1) the particular entourage of subordinate disciplines lends support to and can even shape the system; while (2) the
system determines the selection of and priority amongst entourage members, and
imposes core concepts deployed within them.
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Limitations of space prevent my detailing the five elements of theorising making up my model of the structure and dynamics of natural philosophy.16 However,
one dimension of the model, dealing with natural philosophy as a dynamic and
evolving sub-culture needs to be mentioned. To explicate this notion, I invoke
Marshall Sahlins' way of analysing cultures as dynamic historical entities in terms
of their mechanisms of change and adaptation over time to exogenous and endogenous challenges. Developing an historical category of culture in anthropology, he argues that cultures display specificity of response to outside impingement; they are not simply imprinted upon or pushed around. The dynamics of
response, over time, characterises the culture.17
Similarly my model of natural philosophising includes conceptualising it as a
sub-culture, tradition or field in dynamic process—defined over time by the resultant of its players’ combats over claims, where some claims involve attempts to
respond culturally to variously perceived, and represented, contextual structures
and forces, threats and opportunities. These moves are not determined by a universal logic, may express considerable novelty, but remain specific to the (evolving) culture. 18
3.
Phases and Stages in the ‘Scientific Revolution’ Seen as an
Unfolding Process in the Field of Natural Philosophising
Let us consider a sketch periodisation of the flow and dynamics of natural philosophising. It marks out the central plot of the Scientific Revolution and will allow us to assess its relations with the Baroque.
The periodisation categories are: 19
1.
The Scientific Renaissance, 1500-1600.
16 The five theoretical dimensions of the model, are: [i] natural philosophy as intellectual tradition in the manner of post-Kuhnian science
dynamics with a dash of Skinner; [ii] as competitive creative field (Bourdieu); [iii] as an evolving field of claims governed by rules of utterance, (Foucault); [iv] as an historically dynamic sub-culture of the larger culture (Marshall Sahlins); [v] and as a network of institutions, (Mertonian sociology as refracted through my work with Alan Taylor on the ‘organisation of the experimental life’ at the early
Royal Society: (Schuster and Taylor 1996, 1997). These are developed in my current work in progress on “A Guide to Historiographical
Technique and Pitfalls: The Scientific Revolution and Beyond”.
17 Sahlins (1993) esp. pp. 25,15. “[Cultural orders] reveal their properties by the way they respond to diverse circumstances, organising
those circumstances in specific forms and in the event changing their forms in specific ways. Here, then, in a historical ethnography—an
ethnography that extends, say, over a couple of centuries—here is a method for reconciling form and function in a logic of meaning, for
discovering the relatively invariant and mutable dimensions of structures….the currently fashionable idea that there is nothing usefully
called ‘a culture’—no such reified entity—since the limits of the supposed ‘cultures’ are indeterminate and permeable...paradoxically...misreads a cultural power of inclusion as the inability to maintain a boundary. It is based on an underestimate of the
scope and systematicity of cultures, which are always universal in compass and thereby able to subsume alien objects and persons in logically coherent relationships.” Shapin (1992) speaks of sciences as cultures in process in analogous ways.
18 On internalism/externalism, Schuster (2000a).
19 For more details, and somewhat varying emphases, see Schuster (1990, 2002) and Schuster and Watchirs (1990).
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2.
The Critical Period (or Natural Philosophical Crisis inside a Larger Crisis), 1590-1660.
3.
The Period of Relative Consensus, Muting of Systemic Conflict, New Institutionalisation, and Incipient Fragmentation of the Field, 1660-1720. (Abbreviated as CMF Period below.)
The Scientific Renaissance displays in the subordinate sciences of the ‘entourage’, as well as in natural philosophy, many of the scholarly aims and practices
which already characterized the treatment of classical literature, history and languages in earlier stages of the Renaissance. Established humanist practices of textual recovery, editing, translation, commentary and printing increasingly focused
on the scientific, mathematical and natural philosophical heritage of classical antiquity.20 These developments mark the first stage and essential pre-condition for
the further process of the Scientific Revolution. There was a marked increase in
the recovery, reconstruction and extension of the existing subordinate entourage
sciences, the timing of which differed from field to field.21 This took place amid
the catalyzing influence of the pedagogical and philosophical assault on Scholastic
philosophy; the reassertion of Platonising modes of thought which helped revalue
mathematics as the key to knowledge; and the more general trend toward recasting
the ideal of knowledge in the image of practice, use and progress, rather than contemplation, commentary and conservation.
In natural philosophy a wide and confusing array of non- or anti-Aristotelian
approaches was made available through the recovery, assimilation and publication
of alternatives. Outside of the universities, in princely courts, print house and
workshops of master artisans, the literate practitioner and the practical intellectual
could be set at odds with School philosophy and reach for rhetorical tools against
it. 'Orthodox' Scholastic Aristotelianism, however, remained central to the education of all men, and even enjoyed renewed vigor throughout the sixteenth century.
The Critical Period (or Phase of ‘Crisis within a Crisis’) of the Scientific
Revolution (roughly 1590-1650) saw a conjuncture unique in the history of pursuit
of natural knowledge, whether in classical antiquity, medieval Islam or Renaissance Europe: On the one hand Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes led an accelerated
conceptual transformation in the subordinate entourage sciences—optics, mechanics and astronomy as well as the cognate, mathematics. On the other hand, in natural philosophy the tendencies corrosive of Aristotelianism took on greater urgency. There was heightened, often desperate competition amongst systematic
natural philosophies (some tied to utopian and irenic programs of religious, social
and intellectual reform), issuing in the construction and initial successful dissemi20 Schuster 1990; Dear, 2001a, chap 2; Gaukroger, 2006, pp.139-48; Eisenstein, 1979, vol 1.
21 In mathematical astronomy the Renaissance phase is discernible from the late fifteenth century with the work of Peurbach and Regiomontanus, whilst in mathematics and geometrical optics the pace of the Renaissance phase only accelerates in the later sixteenth century
In geometry this development included not only improved texts and commentaries on Euclid's Elements, but the recovery, translation
and edition of the texts of higher Greek mathematics, of Apollonius, Archimedes, Pappus, and most importantly for the further maturation of algebraic thinking, the work of Diophantus, Anatomy and medical theory followed more closely upon astronomy, the programme
of editing and publishing the complete body of Galen's works culminating in the 1520s and 30s. (Schuster 1990)
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nation of the mechanical philosophy. The Renaissance themes of the reevaluation of practical knowledge and the desire for domination of nature sounded
now more urgently and in a new key, as figures such as Bacon and Descartes systematically assimilated them to natural philosophical programs.22
Out of this proliferation and climactic struggle amongst advocates of competing systems there emerged varieties of mechanical philosophy. By the midseventeenth century the cultural dominance of Aristotelianism collapsed (although
it continued supreme in most universities for another generation). The mechanical
philosophy, in several species, became the dominant genus. Hence my image of a
‘civil war in natural philosophy’, with multiple regime change: from Aristotelianism to mechanism, which had averted a threatened neo-Platonic take over.
This is precisely where the change in natural philosophy needs to be linked to
the 'general crisis of the seventeenth century' and its heightened political, religious and intellectual turmoil. Following Maravall’s strategy, we place the turbulence and contestation within the field of natural philosophising within the larger
crisis. Educated men with natural philosophical interests recognised an imperative
to find, and install, the ‘proper’ system of natural philosophy, because it was
widely believed that the ‘correct’ program for natural knowledge would ipso facto
provide needed support for ‘correct’ religion, as well as a set of directives for improvement of the moral and practical aspects of life. This powered the proliferation of alternative programs to Aristotelianism, and shaped the emergence of
mechanism out of the competitive turbulence thus created. The stakes—political,
moral and religious—inside the natural philosophical field were high.23 That there
was no consensus on ‘correct’ religion casts a poignant light on this struggle and
explains its intensity, as well as, to some degree, its lack of closure.
The following ‘CMF’ Period (1660-1720) is distinctive for the muting of public systematic contestation, especially in the new ‘scientific’ institutions; for the
widespread acceptance of loosely held varieties of the mechanical philosophy; and
for the endemic melding of these variants to Baconian rhetoric of method and ex22 Rossi (1970); Ravetz (1975); Schuster (1990). The latter two build on the richly suggestive early thesis of Lenoble (1943), while taking their
cues about the turbulence in wider intellectual circles from Popkin (1964) and Rabb (1971). More recently, the idea of a crisis period in the gestation
of modern science has been articulated in great detail by H. Floris Cohen (2010), pp. 403-440. His long awaited study offers a tightly argued diachronic model of multiple overlapping and interacting ‘transformations’ in European nature-knowledge, flowing forward from an initial set of crucial
transformations in the generation of Galileo, Kepler, Bacon and the younger Gassendi and Descartes. This initial movement broke with a ‘Renaissance’ phase of development, which had not yet displayed strong indications of reaching beyond what similar recoveries of classical natural philosophy and mathematics had achieved in medieval Islam or late medieval Europe. A crisis of legitimacy immediately ensued, in the middle decades of
the seventeen century. Cohen traces this crisis in several dimensions within the realms of natural philosophy and the subordinate fields, rather than
seeing it, in the manner of Rabb and Popkin, as a larger cultural crisis with an epiphenomenal echo in ‘Science’. According to Cohen’s account, this
crisis momentarily threatened to abort any significant further development. However, it was contingently if sufficiently overcome to permit Cohen’s
subsequent waves of transformation to eventuate. Thus, Cohen’s new model of the Scientific Revolution, reflects and further articulates the idea of a
pivotal moment of crisis in the process (as well as the conception of a ‘Renaissance’ phase in the process).
23 The founders of mechanism hoped to resolve the conflict of natural philosophies in a way which was to them cognitively progressive,
but religiously and politically conservative. Accordingly, mechanism was neither the finest fruit of detached, rational 'modern' thought
finally asserting itself to end 'the confusion', nor was it simply or directly, the reflection of some long rising merchant, administrative or
craftsman-technologist groups, who for some contingent reason invented mechanism between 1630 and 1650. (Schuster 1990)
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periment.24 Under this new, looser umbrella of natural philosophical commitments
a ‘research’ primacy was granted to new (rather than co-opted) experimentation.
Natural philosophers found themselves doing some of their natural philosophising
within the confines of new institutions in ways advantageous to them in institutional and natural philosophical terms. These institutions were additional nodes in
the Europe wide field of natural philosophising, not the exclusive ones, and, they
were not incubators of an essentially new, unified Science, replacing a natural philosophising supposedly barred from their precincts.25
The ironic upshot of the ‘civil war in natural philosophising’ was that, on the
one hand, the entire field of natural philosophising became more autonomous of
other cultural forms such as theology, as well as other branches of philosophy,
whilst, on the other hand, it began a long process of fragmentation into a number
of more modern looking, semi-autonomous, diverse and narrow special domains
or disciplines of natural inquiry, which begin to look like sciences in our modern
sense.
4.
The Dynamics and Rules of Natural Philosophical
Contestation During the ‘Crisis within a Crisis’ Phase
Our overview of the three phases has prepared us to anatomise the types of natural
philosophical contestation and competition prevalent during the critical or crisis
phase of the scientific revolution. This will allow us to focus on how some Baroque norms, modes of behaviour and identity formations may have been recruited
into the natural philosophical struggle during the ‘crisis within a crisis’ phase.
We begin by noting what amounts to an objective condition of the field:26 that
virtually all natural philosophical utterance, by any player, was ultimately referred
back to a template initially learned through neo-Scholastic training in Aristotelian
natural philosophy. Superimposed upon this in the critical period was the fact that
Scholastic Aristotelianism provided the target of strategies of displacement, whilst
competition amongst members of different broad genera of natural philosophising—Aristotelian, neo-Platonic, Magnetic, qualitative atomistic, and finally
24 As to Newton, I hold that we misunderstand the rhythm of the development of early modern science by focusing too intently upon
Newtonian celestial mechanics and physics. Our periodisation, focussing on the trials of natural philosophy, should take this into account, seeing the process in terms of three phases or moments, punctuated, contingently by Newton, rather than aiming for him. See
Schuster and Watchirs (1990), Schuster (1990).
25 For the claims in the second half of this paragraph and their wider historiographical implications: Schuster (2002), Boschiero (2007),
Schuster and Taylor (1997); Schuster and Watchirs (1990).
26 The term ‘objective’ is used here in the sense of Bourdieu (see above, Note 15 and below Note 69), whereby we denote the (modelderived) organisation and dynamics of a competitive field, existing above and beyond the immediate control, or even necessarily the understanding, of actors in the field, and not capable of being instantly or unilaterally modified by the actions of such players in their respective micro contexts. These notions may be related back to the ‘iceberg’ metaphor offered earlier.
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mechanistic—also heated up.27 We can model the dynamics of this increased contestation, thus elucidating the rules (negotiable of course) of such engagement.
4.1. Articulation on Subordinate Disciplines: Grammar and Specific
Utterance
The existence of a field of natural philosophising and its entrenched Aristotelian
templates was a ‘grammatical’ given. However, individual natural philosophers
had differing interests and skills within the entourage of subordinate disciplines.
Each natural philosopher, even Scholastic Aristotelians, had to set priorities
amongst entourage members and link them conceptually to his natural philosophy,
creating a characteristic linkage pattern. The practice of a subordinate discipline
under the aegis of a particular genus of natural philosophy was colored by the nature of that conceptual linkage. The upshot was, metaphorically speaking, a dialectic of grammar and particular utterance, which becomes especially interesting to
examine under conditions of heightened contestation amongst the players, as in
our critical period.
Consider the mixed mathematical fields, under Aristotelianism, where they
were considered to be intermediate between natural philosophy and mathematics
and subordinate to both.28 For example, for Aristotelians, the investigation of the
physical nature of light would fall under natural philosophising, an issue of invoking appropriate principles of matter and cause. In contrast, the mixed mathematical science of geometrical optics studied ray diagrams, in which geometrical lines
represented rays of light, and phenomena such as the reflection and refraction
were dealt with in a descriptive, mathematical manner, which was, according to
27 It has been obvious since Lenoble’s (1943) work that families of natural philosophies competed in respect of the values, aspirations
and religious resonances they endorsed and condemned; see also Rattansi (1963. 1964) and Easlea (1980). The fact that natural philosophy had that entourage of subordinate, more narrow traditions of science-like practice however, resulted in a much fiercer competition
and contestation than even the traditional literature suggests. The situation was actually more like every man for himself, as natural philosophers of similar genealogical stripe—neo-Platonic, proto or emerging mechanist, ‘magnetic’, or chemical—competed with each other
as well: Kepler vs. Fludd; Descartes vs. Gassendi vs. Hobbes; Libavius and other latter day Paracelsians vs. the heritage of Paracelsus
himself.
28 The term ‘mixed mathematics’ was used by Scholastic Aristotelians to refer to a group of disciplines intermediate between natural philosophy, which dealt with those things that change and exist independently of us, and mathematics, which deals with those things that do
not change but have no existence independently of us, since numbers and geometrical figures have (contra Plato) an existence only in our
minds. (Aristotle, Metaphysics Book E.) A physical account of something — such as why celestial bodies are spherical — is an explanation that works in terms of the fundamental principles of the subject matter of physics, that is, it captures the phenomena in terms of what
is changing and has an independent existence, whereas a mathematical account of something — such as the relation between the surface
area and the volume of a sphere — requires a wholly different kind of explanation, one that invokes principles commensurate with the
kinds of things that mathematical entities are. (Aristotle Posterior Analytics, 75a28-38; Cf. 76a23ff and De caelo 306a9-12.) In the De
caelo, 297a9ff, for example, we are offered a physical proof of the sphericity of the earth, not a mathematical one, because we are dealing
with the properties of a physical object. In short, distinct subject matters require distinct principles, and natural philosophy and mathematics are distinct subject matters. However, Aristotle also recognises subordinate or mixed sciences, telling us in the Posterior Analytics,
75b14-16, that ‘the theorem of one science cannot be demonstrated by means of another science, except where these theorems are related
as subordinate to superior: for example, as optical theorems to geometry, or harmonic theorems to arithmetic.’
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Aristotle, incapable of providing causal explanations.29 Thus the grammatically
hegemonic Scholastic viewpoint dominated the question of the relation of mixed
mathematical fields to natural philosophising. However, as the competition
amongst differing approaches to natural philosophy heated up in the early seventeenth century, some natural philosophers hostile to Aristotelianism proposed a
more central explanatory role for mathematics in natural philosophy, and some
sophisticated Scholastic Aristotelians began to loosen the Aristotelian marginalisation of mathematics as non-explanatory. A competitive dynamics eventuated
around attempts to bend the template, or ‘declaratory’, rules of subordination of
the mixed sciences to Aristotelian natural philosophy.30
Similarly, in geometrical astronomy, the fine details and elaborate geometrical
tools of Ptolemaic astronomy eluded plausible realistic interpretation, offering
merely appearance-saving geometrical models, rather than natural philosophical
explanations in terms of matter and cause. However, at a deeper grammatical level the fundamental concepts of Ptolemaic astronomy were shaped by Aristotelian
natural philosophy: the finite earth-centered cosmos, the distinction between the
celestial and the terrestrial realms, the primacy of uniform circular motion. Hence,
there were some, albeit thin, linkages of a causal and matter theoretical nature that
grounded Ptolemaic astronomy and linked it to its ‘parental’ Aristotelian natural
philosophy. But, when Copernican astronomy became hotly debated in the later
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it was not as an instrumental predictive
device, but as a system with realistic claims about the cosmos, implying the need
for a non-Aristotelian natural philosophy, able to explain its physical workings.31
This illustrates how the articulation of a subordinate field to one’s brand of natural
philosophy involved acceptance or bending of the template Aristotelian rules, and
also dictated that the discipline in question be conceptually flavored in terms of
matter and cause explanations derived from that favored natural philosophy.32
But, there was a more radical gambit in articulating a natural philosophy to a
putatively subordinate field. An entire natural philosophy could be launched, or
differentiated off from a broader genus, by borrowing its core conceptual and
normative resources from a now privileged more narrow discipline.33 Articulating
29 Cf Aristotle Physics, 194a10: geometrical optics ‘investigates mathematical lines, but qua physical, not qua mathematical.’
30 The point of introducing the unusual term ‘declaratory’ will be become more clear in Section 4.3 below, where we see how certain
natural philosophical rebels tried to renegotiate, rather than destroy, the formulations of these rules as they received them through their
Scholastic Aristotelian educations into natural philosophy.
31 However, the articulation of a natural philosophy to a mixed science could be much looser than the Copernican example implies. As
just noted, under Aristotelianism geometrical optics, virtually any natural philosophical theory of matter could have been used to provide
an explanatory 'voice over' for this science. Only during the critical phase of the Scientific Revolution, in the optical work of Johannes
Kepler and René Descartes, was there sought a closer interaction between optical theorising and problem solving, on the one hand, and
natural philosophical explanations, on the other.
32 This operated at an individual basis, but over time, such moves could themselves aggregate and form patterns of largely unintended
change in the subordinate disciplines in question.
33 What were constructed were still natural philosophies, within the common field of natural philosophising, but the Aristotelian limitations on the rules or terms of construction were being radically challenged and shifted. Beeckman’s corpuscular mechanism keyed to a
reading and amplification of dynamical interpretations of mechanics, as in the pseudo Aristotelian Mechanical Questions. Descartes’ cor-
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one’s natural philosophy to a favoured interpretation of a favoured discipline invited counter moves, because natural philosophical opponents were stimulated to
co-opt and ‘sanitise’ (of opposing natural philosophical valencies) the domain in
question. In such strategic natural philosophical battles entire subordinate disciplines and their value structures were at stake.34
4.2. Find or Steal Discoveries, Novelties or Facts, including Experimental
Ones
In the critical period there was competitive production of novel experiments and
facts, accompanied by scrambles to co-opt and reinterpret others’ claims, whether
amongst nominal members of the same natural philosophical genus, or across such
families. Note first of all that any given natural philosophy, was capable of
stimulating new developments—discoveries of fact, production of new instruments or experiments—conditioned and shaped by the natural philosophy in question. Aristotelians continued to contend about experimental discoveries and instruments well into the middle of the seventeenth century. The novelties in
Gilbert’s work heavily conditioned by, and in turn affecting the shape of, his neoPlatonic natural philosophy are well known.35 Similarly, Kepler’s, optical, astronomical and celestial mechanical discoveries were shaped by his version of a neoPlatonic philosophy of nature.
The increasing imperative to pursue novelties and embed them within one’s
own natural philosophical agenda did not simply involve filling cabinets of curiosities. To be important in the history and dynamics of natural philosophising,
novelties had to be pursued and coveted within and for natural philosophical purposes. Moreover, appropriation or negation was tactical: If a discovery or claim
puscular-mechanism, surprisingly was keyed in part to the purely static mechanics and hydrostatics of Stevin (and Archimedes) much
overlayed as it developed with material from his own ‘physical’ optics. (Gaukroger and Schuster, 2002; Schuster 2000; Schuster 2005)
34 So, versions of the Chemical philosophy depended for both technical and value orientation on the notion of a spiritualised yet practically productive alchemy, thus powerfully expressing moral-psychological aspirations—a search for redemption through esoteric knowledge and successful practice. These powerful sentiments were partially shared, and certainly co-opted in the programs of Bacon, Descartes and their later seventeenth century followers, for whom the nature and ‘control’ of alchemy was therefore a particularly strategic
issue: The values and aims which Paracelsianism and later the Chemical philosophy invested in alchemy were co-opted, sanitised of radical political and religious resonances and made acceptable to intellectually progressive but socially conservative elites, a ready audience
for the mechanical philosophy. Chemical phenomena were de-spiritualised and reduced to applied mechanistic matter theory, whilst the
search for personal justification and social benefit would now be achieved through proper method and well grounded results, rather than
esoteric insight and wisdom.
35 William Gilbert (1544-1603) in his On the Magnet (1600) suggested a new natural philosophical agenda and content, built on exploiting and metaphorically extending important experimental work he had done on the magnet and magnetic compass. Adopting neoplatonic notions such as the Earth's magnetic soul as an all-pervading spiritual power, he reinterpreted the craft knowledge and lore of
miners and metallurgists, to argue that lodestone is the true elemental nature of the earth; that the earth is a gigantic spherical magnet; and
that, since magnetic force is an immaterial force, the magnetic nature of the entire earth amounts to a cosmic soul or intelligence—
capable of moving, or at least spinning the earth. Similarly, he insisted that his knowledge was productive of useful results, most notably
improving the understanding and use of the magnetic compass in navigation.
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was particularly significant in the architecture of a competing system, it had to be
appropriated, down played, reinterpreted or neutralised.
For example, Harvey’s ultra significant claims about the motion of the heart
and blood became a target in an extended game of inter-systemic competitive
football: Descartes was happy to appropriate Harvey’s epochal, yet clearly Aristotelian based claims to the discovery of the circulation of the blood and motions of
the heart, radically altering the latter (to the point of arguably contradicting it) to
fit his mechanistic program in physiology. Within his radical Chemical natural
philosophy Fludd endorsed the discovery of his friend Harvey, but invested it with
mystical connotations that only aficionados of his natural philosophy could appreciate. The tactical cross fire thickened when Gassendi, a mechanist competing
with Descartes, tried to refute Fludd’s interpretation of the circulation, before going on to reaffirm, against Harvey (and Descartes) the Galenic pores in the septum
of the heart on the basis of claimed first hand witnessing of anatomical facts! For
Gassendi this Galenic claim vindicated the identity of venous and arterial blood,
one of Harvey’s central claims. Hence, with Harvey, Gassendi endorsed the
‘anatomists’ way’ of firsthand experience, yet also preserved a key tenet of Galen,
the ‘physiology expert’, whom both Harvey and Descartes were determined to
displace.
In the critical period the players were happy to co-opt, and reinterpret, each
others’ claims. Symbolic capital was not assigned only to new matters of fact.36
Borrowing and renegotiating facts and discoveries were endemic, because, and
this is crucial, the contest was about systematic natural philosophical advantage,
not the toting up unique, novel discoveries.37
4.3. Bend or Brake Aristotle’s Rules about Mathematics and Natural
Philosophy: The Gambit of ‘Physico-mathematics’
It is often said that Kepler, Galileo, Descartes and others tried to ‘mathematicise
science’. These developments are better understood as products of contestation
and renegotiation in one corner of the natural philosophical field, involving chal36 For example, Gassendi’s observational claim only confirms Galen, and is subservient to the larger natural philosophical contestation in
which he is involved.
37 Descartes’ extended strategic encounter with Gilbert’s work on magnetism illustrates all the above points. What was novel in Gilbert’s
experimentation was co-opted by Descartes without the addition of a single new experiment. For Descartes the nub of the encounter lay
elsewhere. Gilbert's natural philosophical exploitation of the magnet was dictated by his concern to establish a novel system of Magnetic
natural philosophy of distinctly neo-Platonic flavour and embodying and supporting a modified Tychonic cosmology. This was the ‘significance’ of the magnet work that had to be appropriated, reframed, and tamed to the imperatives of Descartes’ program. Gilbert's natural philosophising of the magnet was too important and impressive a gambit in the natural philosophical field to be ignored by his natural
philosophical competitors. Descartes’ efforts were directed at re-glossing Gilbert's experimental work in mechanistic terms, rather than at
extending the number and type of magnetic experiments.. He replaced Gilbert's story of the cosmos making and binding role of the spiritual magnetic force with a mechanist's story of an equally cosmic magnetism which was now the purely mechanical effect of a species of
corpuscle of particular, and peculiar, shape and size, moving in and through suitably configured aggregations of ordinary 'third matter'.
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lenges to the dominant Aristotelian template rules about how the mixed sciences
should relate to natural philosophy. This problem involves our making use of the
category ‘physico-mathematics’, which, like natural philosophy, is both an actors’
term from the time, and a category to be historiographically fleshed out. Recall
the examples we have seen in Section 4.1 of attempts to articulate geometrical astronomy and optics much more closely to anti-Aristotelian natural philosophies,
bringing the matter and cause dimensions of the natural philosophy into play inside the target discipline. This is what one means by players attempting to render
the mixed mathematical disciplines more physico-mathematical. It is not the
mathematisation of natural philosophy, but the physicalisation (tighter natural
'philosophication') of disciplines Aristotelianism held to be merely instrumental
and non-explanatory.
Outcroppings of ‘physico-mathematical’ initiatives began to appear in the sixteenth century, for example, regarding the natural philosophical status of mechanics.38 The heightened natural philosophical contestation of the early seventeenth
century intensified the proliferation, and competition amongst, physicomathematical gambits, a number of which can be identified.39 Physicomathematicians (Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Gilbert, Mersenne and Beeckman to
name the usual suspects) hostile to Aristotelianism claimed that mathematics
could play an explanatory role in natural philosophy. This demanded further articulated accommodation, between their respective innovations in the mixed
mathematical sciences and their respectively favoured natural philosophies.
Consider how the traditional mixed mathematical field of geometrical optics
developed ‘physico-mathematically’ inside the natural philosophical turbulence in
the early seventeenth century: In their optical work Kepler (1604) and Descartes
(1637) each sought closer articulation between optical innovation on the one hand
and natural philosophical explanation on the other. New natural philosophical
theories of matter and cause were taken more intimately to control technical details in geometrical optics, and in turn, technical details in geometrical optics exerted pressure on the exact nature of those natural philosophical claims about matter and cause.40 Under such pressures geometrical optics evolved into a much
38 Hattab (2005), following Liard (1986), Rose and Drake (1971).
39 There were competing varieties of physico-mathematics, running from the conservative version of some leading Jesuits mathematicians [Peter Dear (1995)]; the more radical reading of the classical texts in mechanics — such as the statics and hydrostatics of Archimedes, or the pseudo-Aristotelian Mechanical Problems as part of or relevant to natural philosophy; through to the more innovative
schemes of Kepler's celestial physics, a new physico-mathematical domain; Beeckman’s linking of an emergent corpuscular mechanism
to dynamical interpretations of the simple machines; Descartes’ very radical attempts to ground a corpuscular-mechanism and determine
the principles of its doctrine of causation (laws controlling force and determination of motion) through exploitation of hydrostatical and
optical inquires of a physico-mathematical character; [Gaukroger and Schuster (2002), Schuster (2000, 2005)] and Galileo's sui generis
new science of motion as well as his more piecemeal physico-mathematical excursions, identified by Dear.
40 Kepler practised geometrical optics under, a neo-Platonic natural philosophy and conception of light. (Lindberg, 1976) He got brilliant results in the theory of the camera obscura, theory of vision, and, to some degree, the theory of refraction and the telescope. Descartes emulated Kepler’s technical optical achievements but abandoned the underlying neo-Platonic natural philosophical program. Instead he practised geometrical optics under his version of a mechanical conception of light. He achieved a simple and workable version
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more ‘physico-mathematical’ discipline, in which innovating natural philosophers
extracted natural philosophical capital out of optical work, whilst unintentionally
there emerged at each turn a denser, relatively more independent domain of physico-mathematical optics—a disciplinary area was crystallising as a function of being batted around in the natural philosophical ruck.
Finally, it is useful to ask what it means to talk about players within the field of
natural philosophy obeying, or bending ‘rules’. The physico-mathematicians were
rebels, but not in the sense of intending the destruction of natural philosophising,
but rather attempting to renegotiate the rules of the natural philosophical game. So,
by the first third of the seventeenth century, the given, template-derived rules
about the status of the mixed mathematical sciences were the subject of an unprecedentedly vexed debate and a turbulent state of play.
4.4. “Hot Spots” of Articulation Contest: Additional Causes and Effects of a
Field in Crisis
Just as the overall intensity and ‘spatial’ extent of contestation increased in the
‘crisis within a crisis’ phase of the Scientific Revolution, so new sites of inflammation of contestation appeared, which may be termed ‘hot spots’ in the field of
natural philosophising. A dual process of change took place, involving, on the one
hand, the target—the subordinate science, theory, instrument, novelty or discovery
in question41—and, on the other hand, the natural philosophies contending to exploit the target. One example of a hot spot involved the claims of Harvey discussed above. Not only were they contested, and revised, by natural philosophical
combatants for natural philosophical ends; but, over the next two generations, a
domain of experimental physiological inquiry emerged at this site. Thus later seventeenth century English experimental natural philosophers investigated issues
about ‘cardiology’, the functions of respiration, the blood, the lungs and the atmosphere.42 A new, relatively autonomous domain of inquiry started to crystallise,
as often happened from hot spots, although in this case it suffered a foreshortened
and ultimately abortive trajectory.
The most important hot spot was located where astronomers and natural philosophers tried to articulate realist Copernicanism to natural philosophical claims.
Copernicus himself, with his realist claims for his astronomical theory, had been
de facto attempting what we can now discern as a ‘physico-mathematical’ move.
His theory of astronomy had natural philosophical implications contradicting the
of the law of refraction and a general theory of lenses. Conversely, as I have shown, essential details of Descartes’ mechanistic system
were shaped by his optical successes. Schuster (2000); Schuster (2005). See also Gal and Chen-Morris (2010)
41 Hence the salience of significant novelties and discoveries, immediately up for first time contestation in the field. As interesting novelties emerged across increasingly dynamic and interrelating subordinate fields, the struggles over them increased. Merely gazing at, or
hording or collecting curious new facts may have been a popular pastime, but it was not central to the natural philosophical agon—
contention about curiosities was!
42 Frank (1900), Anstey (2000).
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prevailing Aristotelianism, and in effect demanding a systematic replacement of
major components of astronomical practices and conceptual structures, although
Copernicus himself offered nothing substantial along these lines. A hot spot developed in the natural philosophical field, between systematic natural philosophical theorising and the formerly relatively tame sub-ordinate mixed science of
geometrical astronomy, only when some later players took Copernican realism
more seriously for their own reasons and agendas.
Supporters of realist Copernicanism needed to adduce a framework of nonAristotelian natural philosophy, a new theory of matter and cause, adequate to explaining the heliocentric cosmos. They bid to radicalise the grammar of relation
between mixed mathematics and natural philosophical explanation. The entire late
sixteenth and early seventeenth century debate over realist Copernicanism (culminating in Kepler’s and Descartes’ discourse of ‘celestial physics’) constituted an
inflamed site within the natural philosophical field—no realist Copernicanism, no
inflammation. But why be a realist Copernican unless you intend a quite radical
overhaul of Aristotelian natural philosophy as such?43 Furthermore, it was only in
articulations of natural philosophy onto realist Copernicanism that the possibility
of a ‘physico-mathematical’ astronomy arose, in the form of the emergence of a
new domain, celestial mechanics, with Kepler and Descartes, 44 and the physicalisation of certain astronomical questions.45 Not only was the old mixed mathematical science of Ptolemaic astronomy passing, but the very genus ‘astronomy as
mixed mathematics’ was giving way to physico-mathematical problematics in astronomy and celestial mechanics.
43 The rhythm of this process is fascinating, and important. Copernicus staked his claims upon the truth value of ‘cosmic harmonies’ Copernicus himself was either too timid, or unprepared, to recast his astronomical theories in natural philosophical terms of cosmic matter
and cause. Instead it was Tycho Brahe, who, toward the end of the century kicked off the eventual crisis of natural philosophy/astronomy
articulation by linking his favoured version of quasi Copernican astronomy to significantly altered (Aristotelian) claims in natural philosophy. Gilbert weighed into the contest with arguably the most innovative natural philosophical vision of his generation. Then in short
order Kepler subsumed his brand of Copernicanism within physico-mathematical explanations which in turn resided at the centre of his
neo-Platonic natural philosophy. The situation was similar with Descartes, for in Le Monde he staked the truth of his natural philosophy
on the truth of his version of a physically explained Copernicanism. (Schuster, 2005; Gaukroger 1995)
44 As I have shown elsewhere Schuster (2005), in his Le Monde, Descartes had a complex articulation strategy spanning astronomy, optics and a new challenging utterance in natural philosophy.
45 Such as: What is the nature of the earth as a planet— what can be gathered about the earth, for example, about its structure, its magnetism (Gilbert), its tides (Galileo and Descartes), the nature of local fall, that might support its construal as a planet amongst planets and
allow for the motions Copernicanism required of it; what causes the celestial motions; what physical role does the sun (and all stars in
multiple planet system versions of Copernicanism) play in those motions; does the nature and behaviour of comets throw any light on
these problems, and so on. Jacqueline Biro has recently shown how sixteenth century technical developments in mathematical geography,
which potentially had implications for such questions, were only grudgingly granted by the Scholastic Aristotelians, but eagerly seized as
a resource by natural philosophers advocating Copernican cosmology, such as Copernicus, Gilbert, Bruno, Galileo and Descartes. (Jacqueline Biro, 2009).
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4.5. The Mechanics of Responding to ‘Outside’ Challenges and
Opportunities
We have focussed upon the critical or crisis phase in natural philosophising so that
we can link it to the larger crisis of the age. Maravall constructed a model of Baroque culture, as a concerted elite response to the relevantly perceived aspects of
the ‘general crisis of the seventeenth century’. We, in turn, ask how the natural
philosophical turmoil of the early and mid seventeenth century was shaped by
players’ responses to that same general crisis, and whether, in the process, elements of the then crystallising Baroque culture also were recruited into play in
natural philosophy.
It is easy to cite testimony about the cultural, political, religious and identity
desperation of the day as signs of a general crisis. 46 But, without a clear sense of
how our object of study, natural philosophy, was affected by these larger circumstances, we have not illuminated the possible collateral shaping of ‘natural philosophy in crisis’ by the supervening Baroque culture. In modelling terms, that is,
in terms of constructing historical categories and interpretative structures, this
problem runs as follows: How should we think through the causal role[s] of features of a larger socio-political-religious crisis of the sort posited by Rabb and
Maravall?
After two generations of development of methodological criticism from both
the school of Quentin Skinner and the school of post-Kuhnian sociology of scientific knowledge, we cannot appeal to the ‘influence’ of ideas upon other ideas; nor
can we revisit vulgar Marxism, wherein social and economic structures imprint
corresponding constellations of ideas upon leading thinkers, who just happen to be
cultural dopes.47 However, our model of natural philosophising offers a solution.
The way to deal with ‘contextual drivers, shapers or causes of thought’ is built
into our model of a dynamic agonistic field or tradition, in which competing players deploy resources, and follow (or attempt to revise) rules of engagement, in order to construct claims. The modelling here follows Sahlins' conception of the historicity of cultural dynamics discussed above in Section 2, by extending the idea
of natural philosophical players competing over articulations of their preferred
natural philosophy onto subordinate fields. The players in the natural philosophical tradition responded to ‘outside’ or ‘contextual’ challenges and forces by deciding to bring them into play, inside the field, in the form of new claims, skills, material practices or values. The ‘things’ being brought in had to be represented by
46 Writing long ago, and dealing with opposite chronological ends of the period, Henri Pirenne (1936,—actually written whilst detained
by the Germans 1916-17, Eng trans 1939) and Paul Hazard (1935, English trans. 1963) each captured poignantly the religiously centered
critical desperation and life or death imperative to choice. Compare, for example, Pirenne p.583 on the later sixteenth century and Hazard
p.221 on the later seventeenth; that is depictions respectively from early on in the presumed general crisis and near to its supposed close.
47 Nor do we want to follow intellectual history practice, for example, Popkin (1964) with his hypostatised, growing then resolved ‘sceptical crisis’, and simply give thick enough, untheorised descriptions so that a de facto and largely tacit explanation emerges something
along the psychologistic lines of ‘great thinkers somehow get it into their heads to address the great challenges hanging about in the cultural atmosphere, and hence their intellectual output somehow reflects or is shaped by them’.
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actors in appropriate form—the arguably objective existence of contextual structures and processes that we model and explain did not cause, imprint or ‘influence’ thoughts about natural philosophy by natural philosophers. Rather, appropriately thinkable/writable representations of things about contextual structures
and features were mobilised, used, reshaped and deployed in natural philosophical
claims by players of the natural philosophical game.48 I term these actions by actors ‘the articulation of natural philosophical claims upon things at the boundary
of the field’ and I envision the process as described by Sahlins.49
Hence we are now talking about the shifting ways in which players accounted,
acted upon, and competed over what they took to be the boundaries of the field at
any given moment.50 There were no fixed, essential boundaries of the field of
natural philosophising; no permanent, consensual actors’ account of what was inside natural philosophy and what was outside: what was relevant to natural philosophising and what was not. Rather, [1] the utterances of dominant figures and
groups tended to create, and recreate, a ‘leading or hegemonic picture’ of those
boundaries and how to articulate natural philosophy onto them, whilst [2] articulation upon boundaries was an essential part of the competitive dynamics of the
field. The university neo-Scholastic Aristotelians’ possession of dominant institutions was crucial; but, competitors challenged the way dominant players articulated utterances to boundaries in order to [re-]define the field. The dominant utterances in the field carried a particular selection, weighting and thematisation of
articulations on boundaries. Challengers could reorder these selections, weightings
and contents, and also modify existing articulations, or bring in new ones.
For example, in the university teaching of Aristotelianism, a virtual articulation
was present to whatever version of orthodox religion dominated that particular
polity and university. However, the traditional exclusion of discussion of theology
in the undergraduate course meant that this articulation was tacit, not thematised
48 That is, we historians can model, by evidence based conceptual construction, macro entities such as social, economic and political
structures and processes. We may attribute objective existence in the past to such models if they are well formed, grounded, and consensually agreed by expert modellers. But these [models of] macro entities should not be granted direct causal efficacy over the thoughts
of historical actors by influence or imprinting. And, they should be taken as having been known by actors, if at all, only in terms of their
own discourses and representations, which also need to be studied, and modelled by historians. For example, there undoubtedly was a rise
in the import and scope of the practical arts in the sixteenth century, which itself had needs explanation through macroscopic drivers,
economic, military and political, and which contemporaries partially represented in their own terms and for their own reasons. We only
know about these macro forces and structures through our own evidence based modelling; actors only knew parts of them through their
own representations. So, our models of the drivers will not directly explain the discourse of, say, a Bacon: its occurrence in time, content,
form or motives. For that we need to start by modelling the field of contention in which the actor was moving, as in our study of natural
philosophy, and the particular actor’s likely trajectory through it, and finally his gambits in articulating upon boundaries, where, to complete this circle of interpretation, we understand what underlay the boundaries in terms of our own contextual modelling.
49 The term articulation is used here to deal with ‘external’ forces or drivers in partial emulation of the young Foucault, as in The Archaeology of Knowledge. All my modelling obviously grants much more reality to individual actors and their intentions than doctrinaire
Foucauldianism would. That is because a wider range of resources are invoked in my model building. Cf above Note 16.
50 To this end, I have also benefited from post-Kuhnian sociology of scientific knowledge scholars’ concept of ‘boundary work’ in disciplines or professions (Gieryn, 1983), but, as some readers will sense, my conceptions of boundary maintenance and work upon field or
disciplinary boundaries are wider, more historical and very much tempered by a much modified ‘Foucault’ passed through the filter of
Bourdieuian sociology of agonistic fields.
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in the body of undergraduate natural philosophical teaching. In effect a rule existed about not explicitly articulating natural philosophy to theology from the
natural philosophers’ side of the fence. But, competing utterances from non- and
anti-Aristotelian challengers could mobilise explicit and deeply developed articulations onto religion. To bring in religion explicitly involved devising new utterances, new articulations in depth and degree of thematisation in accord with favoured religious and theological commitments, claims and agendas.51 This gives a
more precise meaning to a Maravall-type formula that ‘some natural philosophers
responded to a perceived crisis with cultural moves inside natural philosophy’.52
Contending players, with differing agendas, were always making out the boundaries and relations of the field, by articulating utterances upon (their selection and
weighting of) boundary structures and discourses. If outside entities and forces
seemed to some to be particularly threatening and challenging (if, hence, a crisis
was in progress), the variety, intensity and scope of competing articulations would
rise, and it did.
To recur the stage of ‘crisis within a crisis’, we can say the following: A genuine sub-culture of natural philosophy existed, in which systems of nature had significant and contested articulations to religious, political and social discourses.
The equally really existing contextual problems and tensions (labelled the ‘general
crisis’) were interpreted by players through the filter of natural philosophising,
thus suggesting that the problems of the age had some of their basis in natural philosophical contention and dissensus. This raised the stakes in finding and enforcing the 'true' philosophy of nature, since natural philosophy was arguably part of
these problems and part of their solutions. Hence the proliferation of desperate
and daring initiatives in neo-Platonic, alchemical, magical and Hermetically
tinged natural philosophy, which in turn, elicited the equally sweeping, desperate
as well as sudden invention of corpuscular-mechanism. Hence, also, a sense of a
crisis of natural philosophising, within a larger general crisis.53
51 This is what we mean by challenging the choice, depth and weighting of an articulation. Similar points attach to politics, or more particularly to issues about the nature and role of ‘the state’, and the contemporary tortured issues of sovereignty, Church governance vis à
vis the state, and issues of civil order and legitimate rebellion (all of which could count as elements in a larger ‘crisis’ perceived and responded to by some natural philosophical players). Most Aristotelian teachers of natural philosophy in the university environment would
have left largely unsaid within natural philosophy its linkages to the local political status quo, and to the institutional arrangements that
supported the very existence of that particular university and its natural philosophical functions. A Bacon or Hobbes, however, articulated natural philosophical utterance in part upon such particular evaluations and agendas of these political issues. But this is not to say
that politics or political doctrines or agendas 'influenced' the natural philosophical utterances of Bacon or Hobbes. Rather, it is to say in
the first instance that within the field of natural philosophy they saw fit to mobilise and deploy such articulations in an effort to win the
natural philosophical agon, and through it, partially to support their properly political aims, now recursively expressed, amongst other
ways, through natural philosophy.
52 Similarly it can be argued that the practical arts and their practitioners did not influence natural philosophers, but rather that certain
natural philosophers articulated their natural philosophical utterances in part upon resources from and about the domain of practical arts.
53 Cf. Schuster (1990) pp. 237-38, which can now be reframed using the more developed model of natural philosophical competition
presented in this section of the present paper.
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5. Recruitment of Baroque Behaviours, Norms and Identities?
Following Maravall we now ask: ‘Were elements of Baroque culture, identity and
behaviour templates recruited into the field of natural philosophy; were there
phenomena inside natural philosophising in its critical phase that make sense as
normal cultural mores of otherwise ‘Baroque-ified’ intellectuals’? That is, we
look for Baroqueness in the very weave of the processes of the game of natural
philosophising.54 The answers fall under overlapping categories of ‘challenges to
Scholasticism’; ‘bending and breaking of rules’; ‘the politics of heroic identity and
honour’, and ‘shifting images and self-understandings of reason’.
Trying to run rings around Scholastic institutions and thinkers was a Baroque
proclivity, although not a new pastime.55 But unlike Renaissance humanism, early
and mid seventeenth century natural philosophising displayed specific forms of
anti-Aristotelianism focussed on strategies of displacement of hegemonic Aristotelianism within a continuing and contested game of natural philosophy. Many desired regime-change within the culture of natural philosophising, not the destruction of the game as such. These are the players Stephen Toulmin picked out as the
anti-Renaissance, self-proclaimed heroes of intellectual and cultural salvation.56
The culture of Renaissance humanism would have to go, as well as the institutional hegemony of neo-Scholastic Aristotelianism. But one did not have to be
Descartes, Hobbes or Bacon to be involved in Baroque-looking rule breaking and
bending. The vogue of seeking out novelty and discovery, not a salient feature of
Scholastic commentary and disputation,57 meant that natural philosophers were
under pressure to change as the entire field became more contested and turbulent.
Neo-Scholasticism taught ‘don’t change the mixed mathematical sciences and
their relation to natural philosophy’. But some bold innovators tried to do so, fomenting and exploring the domain of physico-mathematics. Neo-Scholasticism
said ‘don’t explicitly articulate natural philosophical claims on religious/political
challenges, agendas and debates’. But some innovators tried to do so. NeoScholasticism held de facto, but strongly, ‘don’t bring in “inappropriate” values,
aims or players, particularly anything related to practical arts, material practice,
instruments, and images and rhetoric concerning the status and value of same’.
But many bold and aggressive, hence Baroque-looking, innovators did.
Entrenched rules, norms and practices, reproduced from generation to generation, were under threat of reformation, deformation or rejection. The self image,
self-understanding, and public posturing of the rebels and challengers was one of
54: Friedrich and others who have studied the Baroque as a culture stress that the Baroque was about rule bending and rule breaking, as
well as about especially self-regarding and anguished matters of identity and honour. Friedrich (1962) especially chapter 2 ; Maravall
(1973); Rabb (1975) who treats these phenomena under his category of rising ‘crisis’;
55 Clark (1992)
56 In his Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. (Toulmin, 1990)
57 Which of course is not to say that none went on in Scholastic circles, teaching and textbooks, only that it was not the leading edge of
these phenomena, rather the reluctant follower. (Gascoigne, 1990; Reif, 1969; Schmitt, 1973; Brockliss 1981)
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isolated, heroic, honour seeking, black and white decisive decision-making and
action-taking. We easily label as ‘Baroque personalities’ the political and military
figures of the age—Richelieu, Wallenstein, Gustavus Adophus, Maurice of Nassau, and Olivares—who, engaging their particular businesses in the general crisis,
displayed these cultural identity garments whilst forging new or revised concretions of power (and its legitimations). The highest stakes natural philosophical
players similarly displayed these traits.58 To contest for systemic hegemony meant
that one stood against the rest, including the massed ranks of neo-Scholasticism.
Heroic effort was required, perhaps poignantly (Baroquely?) overlaid with intimations of tragic failure. We cannot know the delicate biographical cum psychological channels through which the Baroque identity and protocols came to be lived
and expressed. But, for many players the situation in natural philosophising
seemed to demand such self-understandings and public imaging, and the presence
of such personalities further enflamed the field.59
In sum to comport oneself in a Baroque manner involved a striving to test and
remould styles and norms, entangled with a search for identity and agenda in line
with images of heroic struggle and individual honour and fame. The more radical
the breaking with available styles and norms, and the more daring and honour/fame seeking the intended identity, the more Baroque the performance. If you
were a natural philosopher in the ‘crisis within a crisis’ phase, numerous avenues
were open to you to pursue and express such traits, whilst natural philosophising:
Is natural philosophy to become mathematical? Is good and true natural philosophy to be decided more in terms of co-opting and explaining novel discoveries?
Can natural philosophy articulate to political theory, medicine, theology or not,
58 With the exception of the gentle, genial Gassendi, a man for that reason well recognised by historians as interestingly generationally
displaced (too late for the scientific renaissance, too early for the age of consensus, muting and fragmentation). (Brundell, 1987) I thank
my colleague Dr Barry Brundell, MSC, for enlightening informally expressed insights about the personality and likely outlook of Gassendi.
59 Importantly, acting Baroquely inside the natural philosophical crisis, did not mean one’s writings have to be notably Baroque by the
standards of later literary classification. Descartes, particularly the young Descartes whom I have been studying, is a fine example of all
this. From 1618 and age twenty-two Descartes, operating at first under his similarly inclined mentor, Beeckman, was a thrusting rebel
against the official university rules about the scope and application of mathematics, without an as yet well defined, maturely expressed,
cause in the game of natural philosophy. Beeckman and Descartes were thumbing their noses at scholastic natural philosophical rules
about the status and role of mixed mathematics, and even the ideal of systematisation. Correlatively, they were willing to take on board
the vague, but trendy concept of physico–mathematics, and in Descartes’ case, his home cooked version of the already circulating idea of
a ‘universal mathematics’, as well, inflating them with aspiration and bravado. Descartes soon went even further, to a putatively world–
beating new analytical method. At each stage Descartes was well pleased. To fancy himself a ‘physico-mathematician’, then a ‘universal
mathematician’, gave him firm placement in a cultural debate, and provided a sense of who he was intellectually (and particularly as
some special specimen of a mathematicising natural philosopher). After ten years of these endeavours, and self-inflations; that is, after
several notable little technical successes and a sequence of ever more grandiose fantasy agendas: ‘physico-mathematics’, ‘universal
mathematics’, and, ‘the method’, it all blew up with the unfinished later portions of the Regulae in 1628-9, at which point he realised he
was actually meant to be a radical version of his own Jesuit scholastic mentors in systemic natural philosophy, leading to an equally rebellious agenda along these more customary lines of systemic natural philosophising. That makes a rather Baroque looking story line
through the natural philosophical currents of the day, without anything Descartes produced in those years, or in the Discourse which retails an ideal version of his life story to that point, being particularly Baroque in the literary sense.
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on whose terms? Is natural philosophy meant to produce useful results? What
then in relation to these questions is the role and identity of the natural philosopher? All these channels were potentially open, and various gambits available
within them. Hence the overall goal of replacing Aristotelianism by producing the
really best and truest natural philosophy became supercharged, with Baroque culture elements in play. The ‘crisis within a crisis’ phase was lived through and
played out, thus, by men inside natural philosophising who often acted, expressed
and understood themselves in Baroque cultural terms.
Finally, it’s possible that part of the self-understanding and public imaging of
competitive players in the ‘crisis within a crisis’ phase had to do with shifting notions of reason relatable to the Baroque. Consider Bernier and Boileau in 1671,
cited in Hazard,60
Whereas for some years past an obscure person, who goes by the name of Reason, has been attempting to make forcible entry into the schools of our University;
and whereas said person, aided and abetted by certain comical quidnuncs calling
themselves Gassendists, Cartesians, Malebranchists, vagabonds all of them, designs to arraign, and then expel Aristotle…
This has nothing to do with nineteenth century characterisations of rationalists
(Descartes/Malebranche) and empiricists (Hobbes, Gassendi). ‘Reason’ here denotes an active, competitive, anti-Scholastic and (in the later seventeenth century
sense) ‘critical’ reason—anti-authority, anti-credulity and anti-self illusion. All
these terms can be imputed to the self-understandings of our earlier crisis players.
This kind of ‘reason’, as a self-understanding and public stance, was arguably
older than Hazard made out, and not totally opposed to everything Baroque.
Rather, it was the obverse side of that self-aggrandising, often desperate competition in natural philosophising, which was partly Baroque in temper and cultural
garb. The identity struggles and comportment of our natural philosophical players,
their competitive plays and their understandings of reason are hence arguably all
of a cloth which had Baroque culture threads running through it. Perhaps Baroque
culture was not all about emotion and manipulation of the senses. When recruited
into core of natural philosophical conflict—by specific intention, or through the
60 Hazard (1963) p.119. Hazard’s conception of a late seventeenth century ‘crisis of the European mind’ ushering in the Enlightenment
may seem contrary to later crisis theories, such as those of Rabb (1975) and Popkin (1964), and similarly averse to the position put in this
paper. The resolution, is this: there was an historical hysteresis (in the Sartreian sense, Sartre,1963, pp. 64, 75 and part III passim) between natural philosophical crisis (which paralleled the hot state structural and religious-political-military turbulence of the early and mid
seventeenth century) and the later, wider ‘Hazard cultural intellectual crisis’. The latter was marked by the prior changes in natural philosophy, and played out largely in the new pan-European literary and cultural media as a density of quarrels and controversies, not as a
set of life and death social, civil and inter-state confrontations and conflicts. The Hazard crisis, marked by the rise of deism, ‘criticism’
and sceptical rationalism; the proto-Enlightenment ‘war’ on tradition, superstition and unreasonable authority; and the quarrel of ancients
and moderns, would not have occurred had not, amongst other things, the trajectory of natural philosophy already unfolded as it had earlier in the century; or if state structures and the inter state-system had not crystallised into their post ‘general crisis’ forms. Perhaps it was
not a crisis at all, just the opening phases and rapidly ramifying crystallisation of new, wider cultural forms, the emergence of the ‘Republic of Letters’ as it were, with a widened reading public and enlarged (open or clandestine) publishing domains. The third, or ‘CMF’,
phase natural philosophy, attendant sciences and new organisations were part of the furniture in the salons in which Hazard’s crisis was
argued out, for these developments had been forged by prior ‘crisis inside a crisis’ if you will.
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Schuster: Relation of Baroque Culture to Trajectory of Natural Philosophy
already formed personalities of the players—‘the Baroque’ was also about ‘reason’ in new senses of critical, competitive, and against the existing rules and authorities. Within the context of natural philosophical contestation delineated in
Section 4, this type of ‘reason’ maps onto the image of the lonely, heroic combatant, wielding ‘reason’ (according to some method of his own devising) as a
weapon to win the natural philosophical game, thus closing down the perceived
‘crisis within a crisis’.
6. An Additional, Surprising, Conjectural Finding
At this point our inquiry yields a surprising speculation: What if one could link the
culture and dynamics of the modern sciences to key elements of the structure and
dynamics of natural philosophising, including some of Baroque provenance? Perhaps certain traits of the modern sciences express competitive, cognitive and rhetorical genes first implanted in European thought during the ‘natural philosophical
crisis within a general crisis’, and which are partially Baroque in tenor. This corresponds to the third type of result envisioned by the Baroque Science problematic
discussed in Section 1.
Consider an ideal typical model of the agonal dynamics of modern scientific
disciplines, grounded in reflection on findings in contemporary history and philosophy of science, and sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK).61 A more nuanced reading of Thomas Kuhn’s model of science dynamics is a good entry
point.62 In simplistic readings of Kuhn, one has rigid—frozen—paradigms facilitating puzzle solving research, until dysfunction, crisis and revolution install a
new puzzle solving paradigm, equally rigid. Against this, post-Kuhnians have explicated “normal science” dynamics using micro-sociological tools.63 In this approach the cultural resources in play in a tradition of research, are constantly subject to re-negotiation and modification. Suppose a problem is solved by
advocating a shift in some aspect of 'the paradigm', however so slight. This means
61 The model presented below is ideal typical. It is not meant to capture the precise social and cognitive dynamics of any particular modern (that is, post early nineteenth century) scientific discipline. As an ideal model, it invites complexification on a case by case basis by
considering variants and emerging long term shifts affecting the sciences as a whole. One suspects that the sorts of ideal models arising
from post-Kuhnian thinking in HPS and SSK are better attuned to what Ravetz (1971) called the classical academic science of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century, rather than the industrial/military science of the mid and late 20th century or the emerging postmodern transdisciplinary sciences of today.
62 Kuhn, properly understood, was fully committed to the idea that the sciences are many, not one Science, and that his theorising was
aimed at providing an ideal typical account of how any given mature science functions, the motor of tradition dynamics in any given science as it were. He also aimed to provide a broad, macroscopic mapping of the trajectories of the sciences over time. Cf. Schuster,
1995b, chapters 15 and 16; 1995a, chapter 8.
63 Ravetz (1971); Schuster (1979); Barnes (1982); M. Mulkay (1979). Latour and Woolgar (1979); Knorr-Cetina (1981); Collins
(1985).
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the problem solution involves feed-back alterations to the paradigm—conceptual,
instrumental, normative. Such alterations—if negotiated into place by the expert
community64—carry over into subsequent rounds of problem-solving, where further alterations may be negotiated. Post-Kuhnian historians and sociologists of
science call such negotiated alterations of the paradigm 'discoveries', when they
involve the conceptual/theoretical ‘objects of inquiry’ in the discipline65, rather
than, say, its instrumental techniques and standards, or norms of adequate procedure and argument.66 Modern scientific disciplines thus display historically
unique, and peculiar, tradition dynamics. They are defined by the fact that tradition modifying alterations are constantly sought, and fought over. This modelling
also highlights the rhetoric that players use in self-understanding their roles and
moves, and in representing them to each other, and to wider publics. Such
‘method-talk’ concerning isolated, non-tradition bound heroic discoveries does not
accurately represent how the sciences work as agonal, novelty producing traditions. Rather, it is an accounting rhetoric used within the sciences as part of the
mechanisms of contestation and accounting for change. 67
Whilst most SSK research involves case studies, Pierre Bourdieu offered a
general model of the social and organisational processes in the sciences, relating
them to their knowledge-making, knowledge-breaking dialectic.68 Bourdieu
places members of a scientific tradition as players in a ‘field’, in a peculiar agonistic relation, involving an economy of material and symbolic resources, strategies
and positions. Bourdieuian players seek a monopoly of the cognitive and social
power at stake in particular field: They have certain amounts of symbolic and material resources (or capital) which they can deploy, strategically, in attempts to secure more resources and more power over the determination of the social and cognitive stakes at risk in the field in the next rounds of play. Given their different
positions, resources and hence strategies, players attempt to produce claims that
are both achievable within the limits of their symbolic capital and likely to prove
significant and attractive to their competitors. These peers accredit such work by
taking it up and redeploying it in their own construction of bids. What
Bourdieuian players play for—the production of non-trivial, new claims that
might be taken up and used by peer-competitors—maps directly onto the postKuhnian conception of ongoing negotiation into place of ‘discoveries’ which shift
64 Of course the form of the discovery claim negotiated into place, and accounted back to the presumed individual discoverer, can differ
greatly from that originally published, let alone imagined, by the first inventor[s] of the claim.
65 The expression “(intellectually constructed) objects of inquiry” is Ravetz’s (1971) term of art in his own early and brilliant sophistication of Kuhn’s original model of ‘normal science’.
66 This post-Kuhnifies the partially separate development of the so-called attributional model of scientific discovery. (Brannigan 1980,
1981; Schaffer 1986); For a textbook level exposition of a case study of these issues of post-Kuhnian notions of discovery and ‘revolution’ see Schuster (1995a) chap 4 and 5.
67 On the politics and rhetoric of method see: Schuster (1984, 1986, 1993); Schuster and R. Yeo (1986b), pp.ix-xxxvii.; Richards and
Schuster (1989). Method-talk is flexibly used by players inside science to account for achievements, failures and allocate credit. It is part
of the self-identity of many practicing scientists and an important part of the public imaging of science and its constituent disciplines.
68 Bourdieu (1975, 1971a, 1971b). Needless to say his model is an ideal type to which empirical fields approximate.
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Schuster: Relation of Baroque Culture to Trajectory of Natural Philosophy
the terms of practice in subsequent rounds of research. But it is crucial to understand that for Bourdieu a ‘system of objective relations’ exists at any given moment amongst the positions already won and occupied in the field, via previous
rounds of struggle. Bourdieu insists that the system of relations should not be reduced to or conflated with the micro-interactions and moment to moment strategies ‘which it in fact determines’.69
Melding the post-Kuhnian and Bourdieuian models, we can see modern natural
sciences as agonistic traditions, manufacturing and negotiating novel shifts of tradition practice, and awarding credit for these shifts, using a rhetoric of individual
methodologically based heroic discovery. But where did this come from? I conjecture that the crisis phase in natural philosophising (itself partaking variously
and diffusely of Baroque culture) left in the dynamics and culture of the field certain competitive practices and accounting rhetorics that survived in the ultimate
descendants of early modern natural philosophy, the modern sciences, partially
shaping their uniqueness as traditions
In Section 3, we noted that an ironic upshot of the ‘civil war in natural philosophising’ was that natural philosophising as a whole became more autonomous of
other cultural forms, whilst it also began a process of fragmentation into a number
of diverse and narrow special domains or disciplines of natural inquiry. The formerly more coherent, if internally contested, domain of natural philosophising began to fragment into, and débouche onto, a suite of successor, more narrow domains. Over the course of the next century natural philosophy faded and died, and
these modern sciences emerged.70
Perhaps this slow but powerful process toward fragmentation of natural philosophy into successor disciplines, first unleashed during the crisis within a crisis,
carried the élan of continuous competition and contestation from the earlier period
right into the structure and dynamics of the successor fields, along with the heroic
methodological accounting rhetoric.71 Perhaps transcribed into the successor fields
69 By the "objective" systematic state of the field at any moment of play, we take Bourdieu to mean that the field exists as an analyst's
model, a historian's model of the internal political economy of the field at a given moment in the style of historiographical category construction alluded to above. As in any model in historiography—for example my model of natural philosophy, or Maravall’s model
(‘structure’) for Baroque culture, or the post-Kuhnian model of research dynamics in a scientific tradition—it is an intellectual construct,
category, constellation of concepts, constructed using social theory, bits of other historical findings, and appeals to evidence about the
field or discipline in question. It then functions, as Bourdieu (and Maravall) suggest, as the ultimate object of study and as an explanatory
resource for understanding particular plays and processes in the field.
70 On this Schuster and Watchirs (1990); Schuster (1990, 2002); Schuster and Taylor (1996, 1997). The domains that emerged in this
process included: the complexly evolving master science, classical mechanics; new versions of the old mixed mathematical fields, now
crystallised as more experimental and ‘physico-mathematical’; and a host of emergent experimental fields which solidified further in the
eighteenth century.
71 An important dimension of this result was the fact that as this process continued, actors’ legitimatory and packaging rhetorics (typically rhetorics of method) evolved to meet the needs of players with these new sorts of aims and agendas. For example a method–
discourse concerning ‘speculative’ vs. ‘experimental’ (natural) philosophy flourished in late seventeenth century England and was deployed, mainly by self-styled advocates of the latter, against real or imagined adversaries of the former stripe as a way of positioning
themselves and their work in a field still inhabited not only by themselves, but by others, including a few players and texts of overtly
theoretical, systematic and contentious natures. (Anstey 2005)
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were the peculiar agonal dynamics according to which the a scientific tradition exists for the purpose of producing accredited novelty, a gene first expressed, in confused and desperate form, during the heated contestation of the critical phase.
7. Conclusion
This inquiry has taken two paths: On the one hand, viewing the Baroque as a cultural epoch in European history, we have tried to understand early modern natural
philosophy, its dynamics and phases, in relation to the picture of Baroque culture
and the general crisis painted by Maravall. On the other hand, we have found an
intriguing hint that the modern natural sciences, as such, bear distinct cultural
genes descending, ultimately, from the culture of the Baroque and the period of
‘civil war in natural philosophy’. Modern sciences are by historical standards very
odd beasts. They are continuously reproduced expert traditions whose very dynamics, and raison d’être in rhetoric and in practical activity, consists in the unremitting, competitive and concerted struggle to construct, and have re-implanted
into the tradition, significantly tradition-altering achievements, which are proffered on a contested basis, and only have effect after being revised and negotiated
into place by peer competitors of the initial proponents. In other words, both the
actual, messy, competitive and political ‘mangle of practice’ inside scientific traditions, and the channels of crisp method rhetoric through which they are understood and accounted for, seem, on close inspection, to bear just legible hallmarks
that say—“forged by somewhat rebellious master practitioners in the white heat of
the early to mid seventeenth century natural philosophical crisis, with some ingredients in part borrowed at that time from the supervening Baroque culture”.
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